A cellular communications provider may have thousands of geographically distributed cell sites and corresponding base stations. Maintenance of the base stations can be expensive, and the costs of sending maintenance crews to malfunctioning base stations can be a significant component of overall maintenance costs. However, it can at times be difficult for a provider to accurately assess the status of a base station. In particular, it can be difficult to detect base station outages or situations in which base station functionality has been impaired.
In some situations, it may be possible to query the base station itself to obtain performance parameters, and to analyze the performance parameters to detect service impairments. However, some operators may avoid doing this because it can consume significant bandwidth. In addition, obtaining and analyzing performance parameters from hundreds or thousands of base stations may call for a large amount of processing power. Furthermore, performance indicators received from the base station may not be accurate or reliable in that they are generated by the base station, which itself might be malfunctioning.
The difficulty in remotely assessing base station status may result in undetected outages, which may negatively affect user experiences. In addition, false alarms and difficulty in determining base station status may result in needlessly dispatching a service crew to a site or in sending the wrong type of service crew.